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Doodle Software Alternatives

Best Doodle Alternatives

Setting up meetings with three to five people can be a royal pain in the proverbial ass. After all, figuring out the time and place that works best for everyone is already a headache.

Now, imagine setting up appointments with more than five people, say 20 volunteers for a large event you’re hosting.

That’s right.

It can easily turn into a disaster.

What is Doodle?

A simple scheduling tool used by known brands such as Apple and Nike, Doodle lets you figure out with ease when the best time to schedule a group meeting. The app’s polling system allows you to create scheduling polls – or simply ask questions – with just a few clicks. The responses are then aggregated to give you the option that works for everyone.

For one-on-one meetings, your public MeetMe URL can be shared with anyone who’d like to request an appointment with you. Should you approve the request, the meeting is automatically added to your calendar.

Doodle works well with other calendars, such as:

Google Calendar

Yahoo Calendar

Microsoft Exchange

For on-the-go use, native apps are available for iPhones and iPads, aside from a mobile web app that works on any mobile device.

Doodle can be used free of charge. For ad-free versions, they have Premium Doodle Private for individuals and Premium Doodle Business or Enterprise for businesses and larger organizations.

Then again, as amazing as Doodle is, it isn’t the only scheduling software that offers tremendous benefits. For those looking for other scheduling software options, below are 10 of the top Doodle alternatives we found on the market.

Google Calendar

Who doesn't use Google nowadays? From search engine to cloud-based storage, from email to collaborative editing, from web analytics to pay-per-click advertising – Google is a powerhouse.

Google Calendar, which can be accessed and used for free via your Google account, helps you organize, schedule, and stay on top of your personal or professional events, meetings, and appointments. Your calendar can be shared with friends or colleagues, so your schedules are in sync with their own when they need to be.

Because the app is cloud-based, it’s accessible from your desktop, laptop, tablet, or smartphone.

Aside from meeting and events scheduling, Google Calendar allows you to invite people to your events and indicate your availability. It lets you create multiple calendars to keep track of personal and professional appointments separately.

To put things in context, add notes, contacts, or links to your Google Calendar schedules and activities. Another handy feature is that the app adds events to your calendar and updates already scheduled events based on what it reads in your Gmail.

If you’re getting Gmail notifications for appointments you haven’t yet entered in your calendar, Google Calendar steps in to automatically do that for you. You can create reminders and schedule notifications to help you keep track of all your schedules. Notifications can either be via email or a text message sent straight to your mobile phone.

Acuity Scheduling

Looking for a scheduling system that can be embedded on your company's website so clients can book appointments with you 24/7 and on the go?

Acuity Scheduling is an online booking solution that can save you and your clients countless hours of scheduling back-and-forth.

One notable Acuity Scheduling feature is the mobile scheduling capability made possible by the app’s responsive framework. Using any mobile device, you and your clients are allowed 24/7 access to the appointment scheduler.

Your clients can also cancel or reschedule booked appointments as long as they do so within the cutoff times or scheduling rules you set up from Acuity Scheduling's administrative portal.

Acuity Scheduling integrates with various calendaring programs such as Outlook, Google, and iCal, making it a versatile scheduling solution. It also integrates with QuickBooks and GoToMeeting.

Acuity Scheduling's dashboard is easily navigable and provides quick links to different customization panes. It gives you a summary of your weekly and monthly bookings, as well as a detailed daily breakdown of your appointments.

Ideal for small and medium businesses, Acuity Scheduling is a feature-packed and versatile program that you can take for a free spin at your convenience.

Bookeo

Like Acuity Scheduling, Bookeo is an online booking system that allows you to accept bookings directly from your website. To reduce the number of no-shows, the app simplifies confirmations, cancellations, reminders, and date changes. It also lets you manage your staff schedules.

Aside from automating the appointment scheduling process, Bookeo can take online payments, affording you more time to focus on your business rather than chasing customers with late payments.

Customers can directly book schedules on your website because Bookeo can be embedded on any page. You can also customize Bookeo's colors and background to perfectly match that of your website.

If you run a Facebook business page, integrate the Bookeo booking app into it, so your customers can also book appointments from there, 24/7.

Another useful Bookeo feature is its ability to manage and publish customer reviews. Once a customer completes an appointment, Bookeo automatically sends a “thank you” email, which can be customized at setup. The same email then asks them to leave a feedback regarding their experience with your company.

These reviews can help your company attract more customers and convert web spectators into actual clients.

ScheduleOnce

ScheduleOnce is different from other scheduling software in that it provides “solutions for every phase of the customer lifecycle,” from lead generation to lead qualification, from onboarding to customer support.

The app allows leads to schedule consultations and product demos directly from your site, instead of simply feeding an online form with their names and contact information so a customer service or sales professional can get back to them at a later time, which often leaves them wondering when that later time would be.

Because ScheduleOnce integrates with most CRM tools, follow-up meetings can be scheduled with prospects and customers directly from the CRM software, so are training, setup, installation, and tier 2 support sessions.

If you’re a business professional, you can accept demo or one-on-one invitations by sharing your ScheduleOnce MeetMe page. Not only does the embedded MeetMe page on your website allow you to schedule staff and customer appointments, you can also use it to schedule resources such as conference rooms and meeting equipment.

Another standout feature is the software’s advanced time zone support. ScheduleOnce works globally by automatically adjusting for time zones. And because ScheduleOnce is a versatile scheduling tool, it caters to your advanced meeting needs, such as multiple meeting types or locations.

ScheduleOnce can also be added as a schedule button or widget to your WordPress site.

BookSteam

A program that has helped thousands of businesses and companies all around the world in eliminating the hassle of traditional booking processes, BookSteam is an online scheduling program that manages appointments, markets your business, and grows your customer base.

Aside from 24/7 online scheduling, features the tool supports include:

Regardless if you do consulting, own a small business or big-box store, you can use BookSteam to set up schedules both for you and your employees, customize your account details, and even manage the schedules of multiple business locations.

BookSteam offers a scheduling widget that you can embed to your website, regardless of the site platform you use:

Yola

Wix

Jimdo

Joomla

Squarespace

And more!

BookSteam can also be added to your Facebook business page.

BookingBug

Used by companies such as Vein Clinics of America, Paradigm Life, Bebe Stores, Babies R Us, Golfsmith, and University of Mobile, BookingBug is an award-winning booking platform that serves SMEs, large enterprises, and government organizations.

It can accept bookings from multiple channels such as online, via mobile, on site, and through a call center.

Business types BookingBug serves are:

Retail

Financial services

Telecommunications

Development and design

Sports and fitness

Hire and rental

Health and beauty

Classes and events

Services and trade

Recording studios

Mobile arcades

Entertainers

And many more!

Aside from managing both your personal and business calendar, BookingBug helps with meeting room reservations, and location and equipment scheduling. The app also works well with numerous third-party business tools.

There’s even a BookingBug version exclusively for Salesforce that auto-populates customer and booking information into Salesforce, and lets you manage the BookingBug daily booking calendar and all BookingBug configurations from within Salesforce, among others.

Besides your Facebook business page, BookingBug can be added to your website, allowing you take bookings directly from there and give your clients a seamless booking experience.

To reduce the number of no-shows, BookingBug sends out customer reminders via email or SMS. The app can also accept payments online.

BookingBug's integration with MailChimp lets you send out newsletters, promotions, and relevant marketing messages to help increase your revenue. Mobile apps can be downloaded from Google Play or iTunes.

BookedIN

BookedIN is a multi-featured online scheduling platform that allows you to:

Manage appointments

Organize client information

Collect payments

Send appointment reminders

Grow your clientele

Improve customer service

And many more!

With BookedIN, creating a page that showcases your services and available schedules can be done in just a few clicks. From there, customers select the schedule that best works for them from their mobile phone, tablet, desktop, or laptop.

Custom details or specific information necessary for each booking can be collected from clients through custom intake forms.

When you sign up with BookedIN, you also get a business listing with the BookedIN Appointments Directory, which is used by customers from various parts of the world to book services online.

Countries with businesses using BookedIN include:

Australia

Bahrain

Canada

Denmark

Ireland

Kuwait

New Zealand

Saudi Arabia

South Africa

Sweden

Switzerland

United Kingdom

United States

BookedIN syncs with other calendaring tools, such as Microsoft Outlook, Apple’s iCal, and Google Calendar.

ShiftPlanning

Used by organizations like Uber, eBay, Evernote, Safeway, and Cisco, ShiftPlanning is a workforce management application that covers four essential business processes:

Employee scheduling

Time clock and attendance

Human resources

Payroll

Shift Planning, in a nutshell, renders your business procedures streamlined, seamless, and more efficient – from managing employee schedules to monitoring staff time and attendance, from time-off tracking to HR document management, from staff training to payroll processing.

ShiftPlanning allows you to create conflict-free schedules, import schedules, and copy shifts. The app also lets your employees set their availability and handle shift-swapping activities among themselves, freeing managers 80% of the time they normally spend on employee scheduling.

ShiftPlanning’s user interface is visual and interactive, and provides multiple graphic views for daily, weekly, and monthly schedules. ShiftPlanning also has mobile and tablet applications not just for Android and iOS devices, but Blackberry as well.

It can be synced with other calendaring solutions such as Google Calendar, iCal and Microsoft Outlook.

The app lets you minimize schedule-related attendance excuses by making sure your employees have anytime, anywhere access to their schedules and shift changes, plus SMS and email notifications.

With ShiftPlanning, you can do automatic scheduling, create unlimited schedules, and have multiple people manage workforce scheduling in your company.

When I Work

Like ShiftPlanning, When I Work is an employee scheduling application that doesn't just save you time on scheduling; it also:

Improves communication channels via manager-to-manager communication, group email and its proprietary TeamTxt service

Monitors staff time and attendance

Tracks time-off requests and employee availability, which allow you to focus on value-added activities that grow your business in the process

It uses the web, mobile apps, email, social media, and text messaging to facilitate schedule creation and management, as well as communicating the schedule and the corresponding changes to your employees.

The When I Work Scheduler makes it easy for you to create employee schedules in a snap. It gives you a view of who's available for a shift. You can fill open shifts, respond to time-off requests, track shift coverage to ensure you have the right people at the right time, and send shift updates to employees.

The Scheduler also gives you detailed resource and budget management information by tracking each personnel's position, hours, and payroll expenses. When I Work lets you see, in just a click of a button, the employees on overtime and everyone’s total wages for a certain payroll period.

When I Work supports multiple locations, so you can perform all these functions not just for one but several business locations as well.

The app can be accessed either through the web or mobile platforms, where staff can monitor shift schedules, set their availability, initiate shift trades, and request time-offs, among other things.

TimeTrade

Last but definitely not the least on our alternative list is TimeTrade. TimeTrade is an online scheduling solution popular with industries like consumer retail, higher education, sales and marketing, financial services, retail banking, and health and wellness.

For sales organizations, TimeTrade catalyzes conversations not just by capturing lead information but by creating appointments that directly and immediately go to a sales representative's calendar.

This process reduces the back-and-forth between prospects and salespeople in finding a mutually agreeable meeting time.

TimeTrade integrates with Salesforce, Google Calendar, and other apps.

TimeTrade's Workgroup edition, which is perfect for teams, finds pride in its configurable appointment router feature. This feature allows you to put a button on your website, and when a customer uses it to schedule a meeting, the request is immediately routed to the calendar of the representative covering the region they’re in.

TimeTrade provides its users with a web portal where you can set up and manage your schedule preferences.

The app also offers a Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCal plugin that lets people see your available schedules. When someone books a schedule, both you and the customer receive an email confirmation.

Final word

As you have seen from the list above, Doodle is not the only option available for your appointments and scheduling needs. Looking into the mentioned alternatives can help you identify the best scheduling tool for you and your company.

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